There Are A Lot More SEOs Than You Realize and Other Observations From the Logs
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Ok. This is not a technical entry. This is a “holy shit I examined my logs” entry.
Recently I was picking apart some sneakiness by Google(to be covered at a later date, when it’s a weekday and this blog actually gets traffic), and it led me to do check for cross-accessed IPs throughout my sites, and a few other checks.
From this I learned 2 things.
- There are A Lot of SEOs - It’s easy for us to either decide that our own little bubble encompasses a fair percentage of the legitimate SEO world(ignoring the little piddly scam directory submission/article companies). I have news. Holy crap we’re wrong. The different things I was logging coming in from inbound IPs was absolutely insane. Which brings us to my next point.
- We Do Not Give Eachother Enough Credit - Blackhat, whitehat, it doesn’t matter. Everyone’s always convinced that they are the best, or second tier. There are some seriously excellent SEOs out there. SEOs from countries I personally cannot pronounce. As will be illustrated in the “curious things I found” section. Some of these people are incredible at tracking.
Some Curious Things I Found
- Browsers that maintained a consistent session, fitted perfectly with human behavior, and rotated IPs throughout a given class C block each time they visited(approximately 2-4 minutes apart)
- Someone (romanian sir, you know who you are, even if I don’t) managed to locate 3 sites of mine. One whitehat, one grayhat, one blackhat. But that’s not the impressive part. The impressive part is that it was manually. Indeed, the referrer log showed him coming in from a directory(of all things) that I had got a link from for the whitehat site, a forum profile of a blackhat site, and a [not telling] from a grayhat site.
- These sites used different registrars
- These sites were on completely different topics
- The sites did not share a single inbound link. In fact, I did a quick check. There is not a single site that even shares an IP with another site that I have an inbound from.
- From over 25 blackhat domains that I checked(my crappy hosting account prevents me from checking more than that), there were 42 different people that investigated the blackhat sites. Of these, 2 were Google being sneaky.
- Out of 5 different heavy duty [non search-engines] scrapers that hit my site, every single one of them paused more in between requests than Live/MSN’s crawler.
- Out of all the referrer spam I got[a lot], 83% of it was Microsoft’s LIVSOP referrer spam. 5 made it in before I updated my cloaker when that story broke.
- Of every filtered[non-search engine] visitor that I received, not a single IP matched up to the readers of this blog. So everyone, feel happy! I’m not link spamming you!
- Someone searched with the phrase SWALLOWED TINFOIL WHAT DO I DO….to that person…hospital…now….then go get smarter…
Ok, now everybody. I’m going to give you all a piece of advice. Some people search for their credit card number to see if it accidentally got indexed somewhere. If you do this Do not click on the damn results. Especially if you include the word “Visa” in your search.
I got 2 of those. But I don’t want them.! And more than that, I don’t want to have to police my damn log files!
Ugh.
Look forward to a juicier post in the next day or so about the anatomy of a manual search from the big G.
-XMCP
February 3rd, 2008 at 8:27 am
Hmm that Romanian SEO makes me want to start searching… see if I can top him :)))
Logs are a wealth of data. Often neglected for the instant gratification of online analytics programs. What analysis tool do you use ? I found Nihuo to be pretty comprehensive
February 3rd, 2008 at 9:53 am
Haha search if you want, just stay away from mine!
I use my own statistics software. It’s a pretty ghetto rig, but had to be heavily customized(it was made for cloaker sites, and awstats/webalizer don’t log the 302 redirects that are common with cloakers)
Besides, knowing the internal database structure is really worth it.
February 3rd, 2008 at 11:10 am
@XMCP: Any plan on making your stats program open-source?
February 3rd, 2008 at 11:16 am
@uGux: It’s really nothing special. It just is built to carry the different classifications for an incoming hit(snooper, user, bot, handjob).
It looks seriously not pretty. Not much point in making it open source.
February 3rd, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Handjob is a classification of user? LOLMAO
As to Google, how do you know it was them? And do you mean Googlebot or Google reviewers?
Finally, what do you think lead the Romanian person to your sites? You leaving footprints around?
February 3rd, 2008 at 9:55 pm
@Gab: I know in these cases that its google because the IP either resides within a Google IP block, or because it accesses a page that is never visible to the public.
As for my footprints, definitely not. These sites were based on 100% different architecture as well as link structure. I have an idea, but I’d prefer to not say it here. Haha.
February 4th, 2008 at 12:52 am
The public invisible page - is that a robot trap? I want to guess offline what you used so hit me up on MSN :D.
And on the footprints issue … I looked around for about 15 - 20 minutes at your code and the best I could find was that it shares footprints with others using the same theme. You certainly cleaned this place up!
February 4th, 2008 at 1:38 am
@Gab:Heh yeah. I don’t use the wordpress setup for anything, and my blackhat sites are not wordpress based.
And the public invisible page was referring to blackhat sites, and it’s pretty simple. If I know I only link spammed pages W, X, and Y, and yet someone goes to Z before it’s indexed…there’s no way they could know of it’s existence without having access to a crawler from my database’s records.
February 4th, 2008 at 6:42 am
These guys are all connected.
They are the same ones that have satellites that can read our thoughts
…and created bongo.
:X
February 4th, 2008 at 11:20 am
@well I never:
Come on now, only the russian blackhats have satellites.
February 4th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
haha guy this post is bad ass. how do i check my logs?
February 6th, 2008 at 1:29 am
Shit! I hate dem Romanian biatches! (Salutare fratzilor - bagati mare!) Them Easter Europeans kick ass and Shady felt the boot.
Truth is I would not consume myself so much over dem logs. It’s worth to watch but … as long as you keep your legs (and sites) spread and not interlinked and footprint free … you’re as safe as you can be with cloaked content! (Safe for cloaked content means funked no matter how you read it!)
So, instead of dodging heart attacks while watching logs … go for better content that won’t get reported.
PS: Aesthetics is important in a cloaked site. Make them better looking and they’ll live longer
PS.S: Shady. I’m away for a few days. I’ll talk to you and send you the stuff when I get back!
PS.S.S: I can’t believe people are so idiot to search their CC number online. Oh GOD! How stoopid can one be?
PS.S.S.S: KC and the Sunshine Band I like the KC and JOJO (all my life) best! Good question. Checkout Wikipedia
February 6th, 2008 at 1:57 am
@5ubliminal: KC and Jojo+Babyface=Love Makin in ma heart
February 7th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Im feeling the love over here